In Juarez, Expiring Justice

Young women were especially prized by factory supervisors because they were considered more reliable and less rowdy than men. Almost overnight, women were making money while men were still struggling to find jobs, leading to resentment in the local macho culture that activists cite as a social undercurrent to the slayings.

Salas walked each day down a treeless dirt road, past piles of rotting garbage and shacks with sagging walls, to catch a bus that took her to a television parts manufacturer. She made about $35 a week, sometimes pulling night shifts and returning home to a neighborhood with no streetlights.

The day that she disappeared should have been joyous; she was getting ready to celebrate her daughter's first birthday. Griselda Salas remembers her sister saying that a friend was going to lend her money to buy presents and party supplies.

"She's probably gone off with some stud," Griselda Salas remembers being told by police when her sister did not return home. "You watch, she'll come back pregnant with a fat belly in a few months."

Vicky Salas was on a religious retreat at the time of her daughter's disappearance. When she returned several days later, members of her church were in tears.

"They've found a dead girl," she remembers her friends telling her. "They think it's Ivonne."

A car accident delayed Vicky Salas's trip to the morgue, which was closed when she arrived. An unsmiling police officer told her, "You'll have to come back tomorrow," and no amount of pleading by a panic-stricken mother could change his mind, she recalled.

Even as the death toll rose, victims' families continued to complain about insensitive investigators. One state attorney general suggested that the women encouraged their attackers by dressing provocatively. Other officials implied that the victims were prostitutes, living "double lives," though their mothers insisted they were poor factory workers.

"They called them the morenitas," Juarez police criminologist Oscar Maynez said in an interview, invoking a derogative term that was in vogue at the time and roughly translates to "little brown ones." "No one cared about investigating their deaths. There was clear sexism and classism."

Mexican federal authorities and international human rights organizations that have investigated the cases have accused local authorities in Ciudad Juarez and the state of Chihuahua of covering up evidence and failing to properly investigate crimes for a decade and a half.

The Washington Office on Latin America, or WOLA, a Washington-based human rights organization, has said the true killers may have been protected by authorities who tortured innocents to confess to the killings. Victims' families have been subjected to harassment.

"One relative of a murder victim received a threatening voicemail message warning her to drop the case; the caller ID showed the call had come from the state judicial police," a WOLA report said.